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Mid-Winter Songs

Introduction

Literary insight and musical inspiration are fused in Lauridsen’s Mid-Winter Songs (1980, orchestrated 1983). For this cycle, Lauridsen’s voracious reading led him to the poetry of the British poet and novelist Robert Graves. To select poems for the Mid-Winter Songs, Lauridsen read—and reread—the complete corpus of Graves’s verse. The composer has testified that he was ‘much taken with the elegance, richness and extraordinary beauty of [Graves’s] poetry and his insights regarding the human experience’. Lauridsen chose verse inspired by the poet’s obsession with his colourful mistress and muse Laura Riding, as well as poetry that reflected the measure of tranquility that Graves attained with his second wife, Beryl.

With the Mid-Winter Songs, Lauridsen boldly reinvented the ‘choral cycle’, imbuing this genre with unwonted emotional depth, formal sophistication and thematic consistency. Thus the Mid-Winter Songs constitute a five-movement choral symphony that evinces a virtuosic degree of integration: all of the main melodic motives developed throughout this score are announced in the dramatic opening measures. Designed as a Bogenform (‘arch form’), the Mid-Winter Songs possess an inner formal logic that does not preclude soaring lyricism—or searing expressivity, as in the opening movement, the harrowing Lament for Pasiphaë.

After the incandescent anguish of this opening lament, the second movement, Like Snow, is a madrigal-like scherzo whose references to winter aptly conjure up that icy icon of Graves’ romantic life, Laura Riding. The succeeding slow movement, She tells her love while half asleep, which Lauridsen describes as filled with ‘tenderness and warmth’, is an encomium to the poet’s second wife that forms the score’s emotional and formal climax. A second choral scherzo follows: filled with jazzy syncopations, Mid-Winter Waking conjures the poet’s joy at the reawakening of his inspiration, which is compared to the first thaw that presages the end of winter. The finale, Intercession in Late October, is a quiet prayer, deeply moving in its evident reluctance to return to coldness, both of weather and of the heart. An extended orchestral interlude recapitulates all of the thematic material, but the Mid-Winter Songs end, like several of Lauridsen’s cycles, in a manner at once poignant and unresolved.

Recordings

'Lauridsen's Mid-Winter Songs unfolds as an astutely constructed choral symphony, with bouncy asymmetrical rhythms and lusty choral writing lea ...'What more can one say of the singing other than that it is Polyphony? This ensemble—surely one of the best small choirs now before the public—invests ...» More

Details

Dying sun, shine warm a little longer!
My eye, dazzled with tears, shall dazzle yours,
Conjuring you to shine and not to move.
You, sun, and I all afternoon have laboured
Beneath a dewless and oppressive cloud—
A fleece now gilded with our common grief
That this must be a night without a moon.
Dying sun, shine warm a little longer!

Faithless she was not: she was very woman,
Smiling with dire impartiality,
Sovereign, with heart unmatched, adored of men,
Until Spring’s cuckoo with bedraggled plumes
Tempted her pity and her truth betrayed.
Then she who shone for all resigned her being,
And this must be a night without a moon.
Dying sun, shine warm a little longer!

She, then, like snow in a dark night,
Fell secretly. And the world waked
With dazzling of the drowsy eye,
So that some muttered ‘Too much light,’
And drew the curtains close.
Like snow, warmer than fingers feared,
And to soil friendly;
Holding the histories of the night
In yet unmelted tracks.

Stirring suddenly from long hibernation
I knew myself once more a poet
Guarded by timeless principalities
Against the worm of death, this hillside haunting;
And [presently] dared open both my eyes.

O gracious, lofty, shone against from under,
Back-of-the-mind-far clouds like towers;
And you, sudden warm airs that blow
Before the expected season of new blossom,
While sheep still gnaw at roots and lambless go—

Be witness that on waking, this mid-winter,
I found her hand in mine laid closely
Who shall watch out the Spring with me.
We stared in silence all around us
But found no winter anywhere to see.

Robert Graves (1895-1985)

No 5: Intercession in Late October
How hard the year dies: no frost yet